Chapter 24

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The Beast’s victories are Pyrrhic in the short run as well.

The human communities that are decimated by plague and fire, their remnants shattered into splinters, deported and jailed, their last remains displayed as trophies, are not in fact defeated, they are never reduced to labor gangs.

Furthermore, the ghosts of those communities, still unreduced, install themselves in corners and closets of the synthetic beast and make their presence known with an interminable hiss or howl that perpetually rattles the unhappy inmates.

Neither plague nor fire nor gunpowder can suppress the ghostly look, the phantom glance that sees the innards as a labor camp and the inmates as zeks. Recoiling from the image reflected by the ghost-mirror, an image of a less than pardisial Today, the unhappy inmates go on hurling themselves toward the happy Tommorrow. Having arrived in America, they rush toward the next America. Already on the frontier, they stomp over each other to be the first Pioneers on the new frontier. And at every frontier the same jarring his, the same inimical howl and the same knowing glance goes on rattling them.

Contrary to the bedtime stories told by the rattled to their apprehensive children, free people simply do not line up at the recruiting posts of factories to apply for jobs. On this northern continent alone, the prospect of the frugal and productive life is greeted by every form of resistance known in Eurasia since the days of the Sumerians.

The surest way to protect oneself from the invading beast’s embrace, at least in the short run, is to withdraw beyond the beast’s reach. This is the resort of the countless human beings who migrate from oceanshores, woodlands, lakes and river valleys to this continent’s Plains.

These Plains, this vast refuge teeming with living beings, this pastureland for herds of numberless buffalo, limitless to the human eye, is nevertheless bounded, protected, isolated from the monster beyond. It is separated from the east by mountains, thick forests and the Long River, from the south by an impassable desert, from the west by impenetrable mountains, from the north by perpetual ice. Here refugees from decimated communities recover their interrupted rhythms, resume their dances, reenact their myths, reconstitute their music. They avail themselves of a European import that is not a synthetic, not a product of industry, but a living being and a friend, even a cousin, namely the horse. People who formerly paddled canoes, planted corn and sheltered in bark lodges arrive on horseback at councilfires surrounded by circles of buffalo-skin lodges. They are the world’s last free human beings.

Those who cannot, despite the ravages, exile themselves from their places of birth, the places where their ancestors lie, have no choice but to confront the invaders. Capitulators, namely applicants for jobs, are rare, so rare that invading Pioneers consider it axiomatic that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

The resistance is fierce and long. It begins when Caribs and Arawaks turn their weapons against the first guests, and it does not end when Guatemoc and the last pain-racked, plague decimated Aztecs fail to retake Tenochtitlan from Cortez and his band.

The resistance goes on for sixteen generatiosn, four Leviathanic centuries during which the beast’s entrails are a perpetually armed camp and the inmates’ first Business is war.

Trophy cases will be stuffed with presumed weapons and portraits of Wilderness Heroes who dared stand in the way of inevitable Progress. The sad Guatemoc’s successors are proof of the invader’s prowess, and the sole proof. The greater the courage of the Wild Conspirator, the greater the feat of the Civilized Conqueror. The proportions of the real events are stood on their heads by the trophy collections which act on viewers like an inverting mirrors. Gigantic tusks and antlers of fabulous beasts recapitulate the fable of little civilized David pitting his modest strength against bullying Goliath.

Armed resistance coordinated by a military strongman and a general staff is a last resort as old as the Guti federation against expanding Sumerians.

Contrary to the Goliath fable, this continent’s strongmen, called Chiefs by the invaders, tend to be average or small in stature, large in vision; their strength is not in their limbs but in their speech.

Unlike the Guti and the Taborites, this continent’s resisters do not end up being encased by their own proto-Leviathanic military organizations. The various federations and alliances are temporary and they remain temporary; their continuity depends on their renewal at every council. If victory depends on the resisters’ becoming like the invaders, the resisters renounce victory and they disband, undefeated.

The armed resistance undertaken by the continent’s free human beings ties up Progress at every step of its March. The first Englishmen who plant a Virginia on the continent’s outer banks and thing their extremely friendly hosts would love to serve the English permanently are quickly disabused of their great expectations.

The friendly Wingina changes his clothes as well as his name and turns into a veritable Guatemoc under the disabused invaders’ very noses. Wingina and Pemisapan, unlike the Aztec, is accompanied by strong and healthy warriors, not by prostrate Smallpox victims, and the first Virginia, unlike New Spain, is reduced to a Lost Colony.

The English name their Nemesis a Conspirator, and they will give the same name to every warrior who successfully resists their incursion. The English reserve names like Patriot or Freedom Fighter for themselves, even though they are the ones conspiring to take the land and enthralled its inhabitants, while the resisters are defending homelands and freedoms. As hypocrites and prevaricators, the Protestant English do not differ from the Papists they consider hypocrites and prevaricators.

French Catholics, not surprisingly, speak of a Conspiracy of Foxes when people of the Great Lakes federate to stop the expansion of New France into their forests and waterways. After almost two generations of war, the Foxes, decimated but still undefeated, disband rather than letting themselves become perpetual war machines in order to continue to confront the infernally persistent invaders. But the French war machine is exhausted by its war with the Foxes, and New France falls prey to the coastal English.

The English in turn try to introduce the amenities of Civilization to the transmontane forests, river valleys and lakes, and are greeted by “conspiracies” even more tenacious than those confronted by their predecessors. The Spaniards who confront Tupac Amaru and a reconstituted Inca stronghold in the Andes do not face the armed resistance that greets the invading English.

The fact that the continent is not empty and that its inhabitants have not been waiting to be Civilized is etched on English memory by a sequence of unprecedented military defeats.

The English are not greeted as liberators from a French yoke by the independent peoples of the Great Lakes.

The Potawatomi and all their cousins federate against the Scalpers, as the English are called by Great Lakes people who have not yet learned this practice. The federation’s first major encounter with the British is known as Braddock’s Defeat, one of the greatest reversals experienced by a European army in the New World.

English land speculators and fur traders nevertheless persist in claiming their God-given right to the woodlands, valleys and lakes, and find themselves face to face with a resistance the likes of which they haven’t yet seen.

All the varied peoples of the woodlands, lakes and valleys, as well as survivors from the invaded coastal lands, peoples of different ways and mutually unintelligible tongues, are united in a single federation and determined to drive the invaders back to the Ocean.

The federated warriors destroy all but two of the numerous British forts and military posts west of the mountains. The warriors fail at the Famous Fort Pitt because the fort’s commander, under orders from the British general, poisons the besiegers with Smallpox. And the warriors fail at the famous Fort Detroit because its siege would involve a loss of life perfectly acceptable to European militarists but totally unacceptable to this continent’s “warlike tribes,” as the English will persist in calling them.

His-storians will dub this episode “Pontiac’s Conspiracy,” adding another Goliath to their catalog of monsters of the Wilderness, one that was too formidable even for the wily and wiry English David.

Yet the real Pontiac is a man of small stature remarkable as an orator but not as a killer, a man who seems to be responsible mainly for the decision not to risk the lives of brothers, cousins and nephews in a capture of Fort Detroit.

The real “conspirators” are numerous seers, some from the invaded coastal lands, who remember, and remind their kin, that their ancestors lived happily without guns, rum, cloth, or invaders from Europe.

The British are so thoroughly thrashed that, despite their retention of the two forts, they capitulate to the federated warriors, they promise to stay out of the lands west of the mountains.

The resisters disband. Their cultures do not encompass the possibility that solemn promises can be simple lies; if someone told them of the prevarications that stand out as the great moments of His-story, they wouldn’t believe it.

Some of the British, the Fur Interests, actually pretend to live up to their promise with the so-called Quebec Act prohibiting incursions over the mountains.

But the coastal British, most of whom are involved with the Land Interests, call the Quebec Act intolerable, declare themselves independent, and march over the mountains with guns and cannons.

The landgrabbers, henceforth known as the Americans, announce themselves to the world as Revolutionaries, as Democrats, as everything under the sun except greedy invaders and unscrupulous scalpers.

But to the Potawatomi and their Great Lakes cousins, honest George Washington and his fellow speculators in expropriated lands are nothing but greedy invaders and unscrupulous scalpers. The never-defeated peoples of the lakes and inland valleys reconstitute their federation and greet the Democratic Americans as they are greeted the Royalist British.

St. Clair and Harmar are not merely the names of two of Washington’s generals. They are names that stand out in American annals the same way Braddock does in British, names of outstanding military reversals, of undisguisable defeat.

In the face of such a foe, the resisters say Yea to life and No to Leviathan by disbanding rather than becoming comparable killing machines. Wayne’s famous victory at an invaded field of allen trees is achieved against the few remaining warriors who do not disperse because they have no homes to which to return.

The Americans eventually devise a strategy worthy of their enterprising spirit, a strategy of confidence. Cudgel in one hand and treaty in the other, they promise to advance no further, and whenever they get a few warriors to believe their promise, they advance.

The most notorious practitioner of this unspeakably hypocritical “gamesmanship” is a wily opportunist called Lewis Cass. This Cass is himself one of the land agents who sell parcels of invaded lands to settlers.

Title in hand, the pioneering settlers realize their dream of dominion by denuding the land of all its tress and animals. Lush woodlands teeming with life are transformed into the desolate fields known as cash-crop farms. The inhabitants of the woodlands are deprived of refuge as well as food. And now the notorious Cass, raised to the post of President Jackson’s Secretary of War, unleashes the American army against the remaining original inhabitants.

At this point, namely when the very environment is rendered uninhabitable to free human beings, when the undefeated resisters are literally undermined, the Americans no longer bother to cover up their genocide. The American program is straightforwardly named an “Indian Removal Bill,” explicitly and proudly genocidal.

Entire populations, including the Potawatomi, are uprooted from their ancestral homes as if they were weeds. Mass deportations that diminish the atrocities of ancient Assyrians are perpetrated by a club of Enlightened confidence men.

And the deportations themselves are yet another way of killing the foe without having to confront him in battle. The deportees, whose wellbeing along the route is entrusted to the emotionally obtuse and predictably corrupt American Army, die on route of starvation and disease because the enterprising military con men profitably sell the food and supplies intended for their charges to pioneering settlers along the routes to the concentration camps.

Settlers with titles rush to devastate the evacuated areas and to raise, on former councilgrounds, schoolhouses where the settlers’ children are taught to recite “Why I’m proud to be an American.”

The murderous invaders now come face to face with the continent’s last free human beings, with those who found refuge from the Leviathan on the endless Plains. Vast military campaigns supplemented by every trick in the American book fail to defeat the resisters. Lying promises are by now of no avail; the people of the plains know Americans are consummate liars.

Another atrocity that boggles the imagination is perpetrated by the agents of Reason and Progress. The world’s population of Bison buffalo is exterminated with a malice byond human comprehension in order to deprive the Plains people of their food and shelter. As destroyers of the very conditions of life, the Americans have no predecessors. An apex of mindless irrationality, this atrocity does not even have a name; no known beasts are capable of it. It is the deed of a mindless and lifeless synthetic.

Yet even after they are deprived of the sources of food and shelter, the emaciated Plains people go on resisting, and they still resist after they are deported to concentration camps.

The last resisters throw themselves into a dance, a Ghost Dance. The shared music, the rhythmic motions revive the emaciated resisters, raise them out of the concentration camp, transport them out of Leviathanic Time, beyond His-story. The dancing Plains people borrow from the Shakers and other Europeans who still retain elements of the European heritage of withdrawal. They dream of a Spirit who will guide them out of the monster’s entrails, a Spirit who will sweep away the invaders and revive the buffalo herds. Never before trapped inside the entrails of a Leviathan, this continent’s free people have no withdrawal heritage of their own; they’ve never before needed to withdraw; they were free outsiders. Disarmed, jailed and starved, they recapitulate the main themes of the anti-Roman crisis cult, the very cult which is still invoked by the American jailers to justify the genocide.